Why The Righteous Mind may be the best common reading for incoming college students

Given the political turmoil on many college campuses, and in America more broadly, what should incoming college students read before they arrive next September?

My publishers at Random House asked me to write up something they could hand out at the annual convention of people who pick common reading books for universities, and who plan out “first year experiences” to give all incoming freshman a shared set of ideas and experiences. I think the case for The Righteous Mind is pretty clearly stated in its subtitle: Why good people are divided by politics and religion. Below is the text that Random House has posted to accompany the book. It may be of use to any professor picking readings for next fall for any course with political content.

Americans have long known that they have racial, ethnic, class, and partisan divides. But the 2016 presidential election has forced all of us to recognize that these gaps may be far larger, more numerous, and more dangerous than we thought. Americans are not just failing to meet each other and know each other. Increasingly, we hate each other—particularly across the partisan divide.

Hatred and mistrust damage democracy, and they can seep onto campus and distort academic life as well. In these politically passionate times, and with all students immersed in social media, it’s no wonder that students, as well as faculty, often say that they are walking on eggshells—fearful of offending anyone by offering a provocative argument or by choosing the wrong word.

If you could pick one book that all incoming college students should read together— one book that would explain what is happening and promote discussion about how to bridge these divisions, what would it be?

My suggestion—The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.

Here’s why:

1) The Righteous Mind is non-partisan, and teaches cross-partisan respect. I’m a social psychologist who has studied moral and political psychology for thirty years. I first began research for The Righteous Mind in 2004, motivated in part by a desire to help progressives do a better job of connecting with American moral values. But after immersing myself in the writings of all sides and doing my best to find the good on all sides, I became a non-partisan centrist. As I show clearly in my book, the three major philosophical camps—left, right, and libertarian—are each the guardians of deep truths about how to have a humane and flourishing society. I treat all sides fairly and respectfully and help students to step out of their “moral matrix” in order to appreciate the ways that ideological teams distort thinking, and blind us to the motives and insights of others.

2) The Righteous Mind makes big ideas accessible to eighteen-year-olds. The Righteous Mind takes students on a tour of the history of life, from bacteria through the present day, explaining the origins of cooperation and human “ultrasociality.” I explain what morality is, how it evolves—both biologically and culturally—and why it differs across societies and centuries. The book explores the fundamentals of social and cognitive psychology to explain why people are so susceptible to “fake news,” or anything else that offers to confirm our pre-existing judgments. In short, it is a book about some of the biggest and most pressing questions addressed by scholars today. This is why the New York Times Book Review hailed it as “A landmark contribution to humanity’s understanding of itself.”

The Righteous Mind has been widely praised by reviewers on the left and the right, many of whom noted that the book conveys the grandest ideas in language that makes it fun and easy to read.

From the left, The Guardian (UK) said: “What makes the book so compelling is the fluid combination of erudition and entertainment.”

From the right, The American Conservative said: “The author is that rare academic who presents complex ideas in a comprehensible manner.”

3) The Righteous Mind links together most of the academy. Like sexuality, morality is too multifaceted to fit within a single department, and I have drawn on scholarship from across the social sciences, humanities, and natural sciences. The Righteous Mind is one of the most interdisciplinary, trade books in recent decades, making it ideal as a common reading that professors across the university will be able to draw on. Students will be thrilled to find so many links among their classes—they’ll see that knowledge is often unified, and that the insights from each field often complement those of others. This table shows which disciplines are drawn on to a substantial degree in each of the three parts of the book:

4) The Righteous Mind comes with lots of supporting materials. I maintain and update regularly a website for the book: RighteousMind.com. The site has a tab of materials labeled “Applying Moral Psych.” There you’ll find a page of resources specifically for professors who are using the book in class. The page has links to videos to show with each chapter, links to projects, and videos created by students. It also has links to research sites, such as YourMorals.org, where students can obtain their own scores on the “Moral Foundations Questionnaire.”

5) The Righteous Mind will make all other conflicts on campus more tractable. In a time of rising conflict and tension on many campuses, The Righteous Mind will calm things down and teach students skills they can use to engage in difficult conversations. As I wrote in the introduction:

Etiquette books tell us not to discuss [politics and religion] in polite company, but I say go ahead. Politics and religion are both expressions of our underlying moral psychology, and an understanding of that psychology can help to bring people together. My goal in this book is to drain some of the heat, anger, and divisiveness out of these topics and replace them with a mixture of awe, wonder, and curiosity.

There is no better way to prepare for discussions of race, gender, climate change, politics, or any other potentially controversial topic than to start your students’ college experience by assigning The Righteous Mind as the “common reading” to your incoming class.

p.s., Short of asking students to buy the book, you could send them to my “politics and polarization” page, where there are many essays and videos. Also, Random House created a very short and inexpensive “Kindle Single,” which is basically just the last chapter, here.

15 Comments

I agree that The Righteous Mind is a must read for incoming college students – and not only for them, and not only in the US. It is a perfect food for thought.

What I understood from 2016 US presidential election:

– Trump received the non-WEIRD white votes

– Hillary received the WEIRD white votes and the votes from ethno-racial minorities.

That’s a weird coalition, because some minorities are far from being WEIRD, even further than the usual republicans (conservative Christians). I think of many Muslims’ opinion about women’ rights and homosexuality, of “macho” attitude traditional for Hispanic males and their more traditional gender roles.

It seems many white liberals (WEIRDs) invested their purity/religion innate impulses in political correctness and now , when confronted with ideas like “whites are on average more intelligent than blacks” or “there are more male geniuses than women geniuses” they react like the catholic hierarchy many centuries ago at the idea than the Earth revolves around the Sun: to thoroughly analyse the possibility, to entertain such thoughts, would be a sin, a heresy! But you can not send Curiosity on Mars if you think that Mars revolves around the Earth, together with the Sun and the other planets.

And so, due in part to that obnoxious political correctness, you have Trump for president. Trump isn’t WEIRD – I think that is part of his appeal to non-WEIRD white people (maybe also to those percents of male Hispanics who voted for him, a true “macho”). In spite of his richness, education, milieu, Trump seems to think like a truck driver and act like a blue collar worker who becomes unexpectedly rich due to lottery or smth.

Have you ever studied the correlation between IQ and WEIRDness ? I think it would be interesting to know. I think there probably is a positive correlation – and I wonder if Trump escaped the WEIRD mentality maybe because he doesn’t have the WEIRD IQ. He thinks vaccines cause autism!

I think the arguments presented in this essay are too modest and humble.
They understate the potential benefits of the lessons of the book.

The “Big Ideas” that are accessible to eighteen year olds are at the crux of the ideological divide and the coming apart.

If students learned, which is to say inculcated from their conscious riders into their intuitive elephants, which is the point of learning, Haidt’s three principles of moral psychology – around which the book is organized – then better empathy and compassion toward one other, and less hate toward those who think differently – would be practically inevitable.

I completely agree that hyper-partisanship is hurting our country. I think the fault is shared equally by both parties, and that they have abdicated their duty to govern in exchange for an obsessive desire seize and hold political power.

Clearly, the two sides are sharply divided, and appear to hate each other. I wonder, however, if the divide is more an issue of direction, rather than goals. Would anyone seriously think that Republicans want sick people to die, children to go hungry or that we return to the days of discrimination and bigotry. And would anyone seriously think that the Democrats want to decimate our national defense, open our borders to uncontrolled immigration and allow rampant lawlessness in our neighborhoods. In truth, I think all people of good will share the same goals for our country, and we simply differ on how to get there. But because of the schism between the two sides, neither will give any consideration to the other sides positions.

I’ve always considered myself a moderate/conservative, but I believe in negotiation and compromise. Both Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton compromised with their opposition, and both managed to get a lot of good done. If the Democrats and Republicans can no longer work together, a centrist third party may be the only way to restore balance to the political process. Such a party could form coalitions with either of the other parties, generally or in specific circumstances, thereby broadening their base and support. It would be a huge undertaking and would require people to relinquish some of the power they derive from the current system. Whatever the solution, I hope that we can do something to encourage both sides to work together.

Dr. Haidt, I know you’re trying to write a book right now, but I want to urge you to find some time to speak about what’s happening in our country these days. I feel like your insights from your research might be able to help the rational members of our two main political parties, and the voters who support them, find ways to calm the civil discourse and to stop demonizing each other. Did you see David Brooks’ Op/Ed in the New York Times today? Whether he knows it or not, he’s talking about what you’ve been observing in your research and writing about for years. You could be a voice of reason in this sea of anger and loathing. Please speak up!

Since watching your podcast with Sam Harris, I’ve read many of your blog posts and watched a few of your talks. I’m fascinated with your ability to hear both sides of an argument and question your own views.

Your answer to a question on Quora says you have never voted for a Republican. On the other hand, I have never seen you criticize conservatives or republicans (the one exception is “Conservatives good, republicans bad” which you retracted).

So my question is… Why is 100% of your criticism directed toward liberals when 0% of your votes are for republicans? I feel like there should be a more public post that you have never supported a republican (Aside from McCain2000) in your entire life (if it’s in your books, I apologize).

Many of my conservative friends use you as the best evidence for why I should vote for republicans even though you yourself have never voted for one at any level. This type of misunderstanding is more common than (it appears) your aware of.

Let me provide just one example of how this misundertanding continues to live: You state in an interview that “if liberals ruled the world, everything would collapse… If conservatives ruled the world, it would be very unpleasant”. For someone that has only voted democratic for decades, don’t you think this is slightly out of touch with your actual beliefs?

Anyway, thank you for listening. As a liberal (I’m sliding more and more into the “centrist” category with every passing day), I enjoy that you are able to remove me from my bubble and give me much more to think about than many others in this space.

This is a good question, Ian. I have never voted for a republican because 1) i don’t agree with them on the major social issues (abortion rights, global warming, gay rights) and because I think they have been extremely irresponsible when in government — GWB busting the budget and starting the Iraq war, which broke the world, to say nothing of our current president. I mildly dislike the Democratic Party, but I strongly dislike the Republican party. But I rarely comment on the parties. In recent years I have been trying to fix my part of the world — the academy, which, as I see it, is divided between the liberal left and the illiberal left. I dislike illiberalism on both sides, but in my part of the world–on campus– illiberalism comes mostly from the left. This is not a full answer. You are right that I should pay more attention to the balance of my comments, and should be more vocal in criticisms of the right. I do that sometimes in my twitter feed, esp. of Trump and his terrible business ethics, which is germane to my areas of expertise, and in a recent post at HxA on how intimidation on campus now comes from both sides. Thanks for this prompt.

I think the distinction between the ideological spectrum and political parties is a distinction that I (and most people) failed to make. I also didn’t fully understand that your comments were made in the context of academia rather than the greater scope of political discourse. This clarifies almost all of your positions in my eyes, considering the level of illiberalism in University classrooms.

Adam Smith has a passage in The Theory of Moral Sentiments that reminded me of your book and the recent article about you in the Chronicle of Higher Education. He refers to “furious zealots” who “impute all their own prejudices” to “the great Judge of the universe”

The animosity of hostile factions, whether civil or ecclesiastical, is often still more furious than that of hostile nations; and their conduct towards one another is often still more atrocious. What may be called the laws of faction have often been laid down by grave authors with still less regard to the rules of justice than what are called the laws of nations. The most ferocious patriot never stated it as a serious question, Whether faith ought to be kept with public enemies?—Whether faith ought to be kept with rebels? Whether faith ought to be kept with heretics? are questions which have been often furiously agitated by celebrated doctors both civil and ecclesiastical. It is needless to observe, I presume, that both rebels and heretics are those unlucky persons, who, when things have come to a certain degree of violence, have the misfortune to be of the weaker party. In a nation distracted by faction, there are, no doubt, always a few, though commonly but a very few, who preserve their judgment untainted by the general contagion. They seldom amount to more than, here and there, a solitary individual, without any influence, excluded, by his own candour, from the confidence of either party, and who, though he may be one of the wisest, is necessarily, upon that very account, one of the most insignificant men in the society. All such people are held in contempt and derision, frequently in detestation, by the furious zealots of both parties. A true party-man hates and despises candour; and, in reality, there is no vice which could so effectually disqualify him for the trade of a party-man as that single virtue. The real, revered, and impartial spectator, therefore, is, upon no occasion, at a greater distance than amidst the violence and rage of contending parties. To them, it may be said, that such a spectator scarce exists any where in the universe. Even to the great Judge of the universe, they impute all their own prejudices, and often view that Divine Being as animated by all their own vindictive and implacable passions. Of all the corrupters of moral sentiments, therefore, faction and fanaticism have always been by far the greatest.

Hello Dr. Haidt. I am a Korean National Open University student who read your book(“The Righteous Mind”) impressively. My major is Information Statistics, and I want to study psychology(Ph.D course) in American university graduate school. So I study psychology steadily for the future. Of course, I read some of your papers. I really really respect you and agree with your point of view. But I feel ‘little’ uncomfortable with your research methodology. Because it is questionable whether we should have had to engage in evolutionary psychology in order to enhance the conviction of the study. I think… It doesn’t necessarily need to involve evolutionary psychology. To prove that people tend to be intuitive. It’s almost impossible to talk about evolutionary psychology among Korean young scientists who enjoy using Facebook. Because they think evolutionary psychology has already decayed from the borderlands-science to the pseudo-science. They offer several reasons.

(1) “Evolutionary psychology studies are not statistically sincere”: Evolutionary psychology claims that ” A factor influences on a B” and demonstrates its statistical significance. However, most of the research ends without confirming “how much” A influences B.

(2) “Evolutionary psychology claims that human psychology is in a genetic background, but there is insufficient evidence to suggest it.”: For example, David Buss, a prominent evolutionary psychologist, presents a sexual preference for men and women in 37 cultures. And argues that this preference comes from genetic backgrounds. However, the evidence is only “common in 37 different cultures.” There is no evidence that the cause of these findings is “genetic” causes.

(3) “Evolutionary psychology is a study that began in the 1970s when there was a lack of knowledge about human genome.”: In the early 2000s, the genome project was completed. Later, the knowledge we gained is counterbalanced with the basic premise of evolutionary psychology. Like the EEA(The environment of evolutionary adaptedness). The EEA argues that human cognitive processes are adaptive in the environment of certain age. Then assume that the changes were minimal. However, studies show that up to 10 percent of the human genome has changed significantly over the past 50,000 years.(Williamson, 2007) Somehow, evolutionary psychologists tend not to base genetic research in the aftermath of the 1990s.

(4) “It is hard to believe that the universal cognitive mechanism of human beings is fixed.”: Evolutionary psychology assumes the following reasons for the causes of diversity in human behaviour. The diversity in human behavior is not due to the differences in cognitive mechanism of each human being. This is due to the diversity of environmental factors in each individual. Therefore, only Western college students are being recruited as subjects. However, recent neuroscience researches show that the environmental factors of before birth(development) and after birth(growth) have a tremendous impact on the development and structure of the brain.(Li, 2003)

(5) “Evolutionary psychology has already given enough time.”: The philosopher of science Imre Lakatos insists that a new research program requires plenty of time. Evolutionary psychology has already passed half a century. Thus, evolutionary psychology is now a pseudo-science.

I think the above positions sound convincing as well. However, my complaint about your research methodology are only a minor complaint. I think You probably wanted to argue that intuition is a powerful human nature. But without evolutionary psychology, your research is already excellent. I’d like to hear your opinion because there may be something wrong with my opinion. I am sorry for my lack of English skills. Thank you.

As I show clearly in my book, the three major philosophical camps—left, right, and libertarian—are each the guardians of deep truths about how to have a humane and flourishing society.

How could we possibly trust a psychologist—to just take your word for it—on the pluralist claim that these camps all contain moral truths, when you don’t even engage with any ethics and metaethics of the last century? A glancing footnote to Gibbard or Nussbaum offers no reassurance that you’re the slightest bit familiar with contemporary philosophical work on moral truth and on which ‘camps’ contain moral truth. Indeed, if moral reasoning is always or typically post facto rationalization and motivated reasoning, then how could you confidently assure anyone that the error-theorists are wrong and there even is any moral truth, deep or otherwise? By all means, feel free to tell us about the different “moral matrices” occupied by different people and cultures (fine and important work for a psychologist), but where do you get the authority to declare that all the matrices contain deep truths, or to condemn each and every non-pluralist ethical view which rejects most of the matrices as thoroughly untrue? Hell, even in the book you often confine yourself to saying that pluralism is “true descriptively”, since “in psychology our goal is descriptive”. But now you’re saying it’s been “show[n] clearly” to be true, as a prescriptive claim about deep moral truth? Look, you might dig the aura of open-minded tolerance and friendly conversation that surrounds pluralism, but to claim that you’ve somehow shown it clearly to be true in a book on psychology, without even bothering to address the work of all the philosophers who disagree, is overweening and absurd. Indeed, it exemplifies an unwillingness to learn what the other side is saying before declaring it false—exactly the vice you claim to oppose.

I just finished your book and it has explained many issues I have puzzled over for quite some time. I am a conservative and I believe your book describes my moral matrix extremely well. It also explains why it is so hard for me to have a political conversation with
liberals.

I have never understood why in my conversations with liberals where my efforts to direct the conversation to fact driven conclusions always end up in my being insulted or the liberal segueing the conversation to an unrelated straw man argument that has little relation the the facts we were just talking about. Your book has answered this question for me.

Yes, I think your book would be a great read for incoming students, but I also think it would be even more important for your peers in academia to read it.

At the risk of offending you and your peers, I would like to make an analogy that came to me while reading your book. If liberals only use 3 of the 6 moral foundations, could this be analogous to the psychological disorder of a psychopath who lacks empathy, i.e. could Liberals be the “moral matrix” equivalent of a psychopath?

My conservative friends and I do not avoid interactions with liberals. We welcome political dialog with them and want to understand their point of view. We understand that their heighten sense of empathy can enrich society with with their art, movies, music and focus on the oppressed. However, given my analogy above, don’t you think society and academia is being hurt by the exclusion of conservative professors? I don’t think teaching and mentoring can be separated from our moral matrix, so isn’t it a disservice to students to be taught primarily by professors using only 3 of the 6 moral foundations? Also, aren’t the professors limiting themselves professionally disassociating from others who have different and more complete moral matrixes.

I have had close dealings with two different psychopaths, and I believe one of them is smart enough to understand something is different about himself, i.e. the lack of empathy. I also think that the liberals may understand this to a certain extent, but like the psychopath can’t understand empathy, the liberal cannot understand a different moral matrix. The experiments your referenced in your book confirm this. In academia I believe your colleagues unconsciously may not allow hiring of conservative professors as a way to avoid facing this deficiency in themselves and see no moral problem with passing their moral matrix onto to their students to the exclusion of other moral matrices.

Your book argues that society needs both conservative and liberal moral matrices and I would argue academia needs the same.